Solstice-aligned wooden post monument from 3000 BC discovered near Stonehenge, a 'once in a lifetime' find
A Wessex Archaeology team led by Phil Harding has unearthed a 5,000-year-old timber structure at Bulford, three miles from Stonehenge, aligned with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. The find predates the stone circle's famous trilithon alignment by half a millennium.
The discovery
A pair of large post pits discovered during archaeological work ahead of Ministry of Defence housing construction at Bulford in Wiltshire turned out to be the footprint of a 5,000-year-old wooden monument deliberately aligned with the sun. The excavation, carried out between 2015 and 2017 on a 13-hectare site, uncovered 48 ritual pits rich in pottery, animal bone, worked flints and charcoal, along with two distinctive postholes filled with chalk rubble rather than feasting debris. The site lies 5km (3 miles) from the Stonehenge World Heritage Site and is the earliest known solstice-aligned structure in the landscape.
The thing that struck me as soon as I saw that was that [the line was] about 50 degrees off the direct north, which was pretty much the line of the midsummer sunrise. And so I got really, really excited about that.
Solar alignment confirmed
Phil Harding, who led the dig for Wessex Archaeology, only recognised the significance during later analysis when he drew a line with pencil and ruler between the two larger postholes. His interpretation was then confirmed by Fabio Silva, a skyscape archaeologist specialising in ancient astronomical mapping. Radiocarbon dating placed the structure around 2950 BC, and Silva showed that the two wooden poles, estimated to have stood 3-4 metres high based on the 1-metre depth of the post pits, would have aligned like a gunsight with the rising sun at midsummer and the setting sun at midwinter in that period.
The solstitial alignment discovered at Bulford is likely to help encourage archaeoastronomers to investigate whether there are similar solar alignments in even older monuments in Britain, Ireland, western France and elsewhere.
- Bulford wooden posts erected, aligned with midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. Stonehenge’s circular earthen bank constructed.
- Stonehenge’s trilithon sarsen stones placed to precisely mark midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.
A prototype for Stonehenge
Stonehenge’s earliest phase, a circular earthen bank roughly 115 metres in diameter, dates to the same era as the Bulford site, around 3000 BC. It is now thought that early Stonehenge may have had similar solstice-marking wooden posts on opposite sides of the earthwork circle, preceding the iconic sarsen stone alignment built half a millennium later. Both monuments were deliberately oriented to mark the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset, and the Bulford poles may represent a prototype for what would later be rendered in stone at Stonehenge.
Ritual landscape and finds
The Bulford pits contained large quantities of feasting remains, suggesting that substantial gatherings took place there over a relatively short period to celebrate the sun. Among the finds, a smaller pit aligned with the posts held a very rare disc-shaped flint knife, deliberately placed, possibly as a symbolic reference to the sun disc. This pit is interpreted as a viewing station for the solstice.
It’s certainly the highlight of my career.
Across Europe, the only other precisely solar-aligned monuments of comparable or greater age are a giant tomb in Ireland and at least two temples in Malta. The discovery is being described as a once-in-a-lifetime find that will prompt renewed searches for similar alignments elsewhere.
